NEITHER THE INTENTION NOR ABILITY TO PROTECT AMERICA

In a March, 2008 interview John Brennan, then the chief adviser on intelligence matters for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, said he thought the Bush administration was too concerned about terrorism.

"You don’t want to just troll and with a large net just pull up everything," Mr. Brennan, now the Deputy National Security Adviser, told Shane Harris, the intelligence and homeland security correspondent for the National Journal.  "I would argue the government needs to have access to only those nuggets of information that have some kind of predicate."

"In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the threshold (for reporting information up the chain) was quite low," Mr. Brennan said.  "Every effort was made by the government to try to get as much understanding and visibility into what else might be out there that’s going to hurt us again."

But, Mr. Brennan said, "now that a number of years have passed, we need to make sure the calibration is important."  The threshold for reporting information about suspected terrorists should be higher, he said.

In an interview published yesterday (01/07), National Security Adviser James Jones said Americans will feel "a certain shock" when they learn of all the clues security agencies overlooked in the case of the eunuch bomber.

Among the red flags was a dossier provided by Britain‘s MI5 in 2008 which listed Umar Abdulmutallab among Moslems in Britain who sought contacts with extremists.

Information about potential terrorists supplied by foreign intelligence agencies was given a higher priority during the Bush administration, a State Department employee told the American Spectator.  But now "we are encouraged to not create the appearance that we are profiling or targeting Moslems."

Mr. Brennan’s more relaxed attitude toward the threat of Islamic terror is reflected in the National Intelligence Strategy for 2009, in which global warming and pandemic disease (the H1N1 virus) compete with al Qaeda for the attention and resources of the Intelligence Community.

A shift in focus to natural disasters from terrorism prevention is part of the reason why the inspector general for Department of Homeland Security said, in a report issued in November, that DHS’ National Operations Center is "unable" to do its job of ensuring coordination among the 22 agencies that comprise DHS.

That relaxed attitude evidently also was shared by President Obama, whose initial reaction to the attempted Christmas bombing was annoyance that his vacation was interrupted.

"Someday somebody not connected with Hollywood will make a movie about President Obama’s disastrous vacation," wrote New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin. 

"About how his aides waited for nearly three hours after the Christmas airliner attack to wake him.  About how he waited three more days to appear publicly.  About how even then he didn’t grasp the seriousness of the situation, racing through a bloodless speech so he could play golf."

The movie would have a cameo appearance by Michael Leiter, the chief of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), who didn’t think the incident was significant enough to cut his ski vacation short.  Perhaps Mr. Leiter couldn’t afford the plane ticket back. 

"The highly touted intelligence fusion center at the heart of the nation’s counterterrorism establishment was preparing for deep budget cuts across 2010," Marc Ambinder wrote in the Atlantic Tuesday (01/05). 

"According to one official, the administration and Congress slashed the budget for the National Counterterrorism Center by at least $25 million.  Those affected, the official said, included employees responsible for maintaining the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) system, which contains the list of about 550,000 known or suspected terrorists."

"You either have to give (terrorism) top priority, or not," former Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind), who was vice chair of the 9/11 Commission, told ABC’s Jake Tapper.  "We have not given it sufficient priority."

"You can’t put all the responsibility on the president," Mr. Hamilton said.  "But obviously he shares a major part of it."

President Obama talked tough in a news conference yesterday with Mr. Brennan and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano in which he released a heavily redacted summary of the boo boos the intelligence and security agencies had made.  He "accepted responsibility" for the mistakes.

"The buck stops with me," the president said. He ordered the intelligence agencies in the future actually to follow up on terrorism leads.  And he directed the agencies to hold someone accountable for future screwups.

But no one will be held accountable for the screwup this time, certainly not Mr. Obama, and not even Mr. Leiter, even though the summary Mr. Obama released described the NCTC, which Mr. Leiter has headed for three years, as neither "comprehensive nor functioning."

As the New York Daily News noted in an editorial today (01/08), "that doesn’t come close to accountability.  That’s bunker mode insanity."

The responses Mr. Brennan and Ms. Napolitano — who famously declared two weeks ago "the system worked" — gave to a question they were asked at the news conference raises doubts about their fitness to remain in the jobs they hold.

They were asked what in the investigation of the Blow Your Balls Off For Allah Bomber surprised them the most.

Mr. Brennan said what surprised him the most was that there was a close connection between al Qaeda in Yemen, where Mr. Abdulmutallab trained for his mission, and al Qaeda headquarters in Pakistan.  Well, duh!  What a moron.

Ms. Napolitano said what surprised her the most was "the tactic of using an individual to foment an attack, as opposed to a large conspiracy or a multi-person conspiracy such as we saw on 9/11." 

She evidently never heard of Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, even though his attempt to blow up American Air Lines Flight 63 in 2001 was front page news for many days – and is the cause of our having to take off our shoes in airport security.

When people in key security positions appear to know less about terrorism than does the typical newspaper reader, that alone should be reason enough to replace them. 

The president has, at long last, paid lip service to the war on terror.  But as Michael Gerson noted in the Washington Post the day before : "Lip service is different from leadership.  In the war on terrorism, 2009 was not a year of urgency and vigilance.  It was a year of lullabies, hot toddies, and Ambien — though it nearly ended with a bang."

He really doesn’t have any intention or ability to protect us.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.